The Opposite of Death
by rallamajoop
Summary: So you die, and then you get over it and get on with your life. Neku and friends get their first chance to trade notes on some of the stranger side-effects to come with being alive again. Contains some light Shiki/Eri and Joshua/Neku implications in later chapters.
1. Shock and Numbness

Originally posted under the full title of "The Opposite of Death (and the Recognised Stages of Coming To Terms with your Gain)"

* * *

**1. Shock and Numbness**

It's been said, under the astute wisdom of certain circles of pop-psychology, that wanting something is better than having it, and Neku has to admit there might even be some truth to that considering that it took a week of being dead to teach him to appreciate a whole lot of what was out there to make being alive so thoroughly worthwhile. On the other hand, he spent three weeks wanting little more than to make it out of the Game in one piece, and now he's done it he's pretty confident that nothing – not all the emo-urges that school, family and the modern rat-race in all its horror combined could ever hope to inspire – are ever going to make him regret pulling it off.

That said, being alive again might have been taking a little more adjusting than he'd prepared for.

The embarrassing part is that there's nothing in it he shouldn't have expected from the start. If he'd spared even a moment to think about it he would have seen something like this coming: he'd have remembered that in all the years of his life he's never once seen anyone make the international news after coming back from the dead, and there are only so many ways to reconcile that with the nature of the Reaper's Game that wouldn't have made him give up on the spot. If anyone had actually come out and asked Neku how he thought it all worked, he'd have had to admit he'd pretty much been taking it for granted that what happened in the UG stayed in the UG and it'd all take care of itself. At the least that was still a much more comforting explanation than what was frankly the more plausible possibility - that the promise of being returned to life had never been any more than a carrot on a string the Reapers were dangling in front of his eyes to keep him dancing to their tune. But un-life in the UG had had a way of keeping them too busy to worry about the big picture, and no matter what the objective was, the reality was that on a shear moment-to-moment basis they'd never been playing to win nearly so much as they'd been playing _not_ to _lose_. The risk of being erased was not only a constant and incredibly motivational threat, it was a fate so horrible it was didn't bear thinking about – and if they weren't going to waste time thinking about that then they certainly weren't going to have the time to waste worrying about anything _less_ immediate.

The long and short is that even if the question had occurred to him, the healthiest thing he could have done would have been to push it to the back of his mind and forget about it, because sometimes denial is the only thing that keeps you going. So when it finally became an issue he had no defenses, and the Reapers' parting shot against his sanity got him with both barrels.

* * *

"…then outta nowhere we get this lecture on _road safety_. But it was like our folks didn't know _why_ they was giving it – like someone gave 'em a script an' they were just reading it all out at us."

Beat looks every bit as worked up as he sounds; like he wants to crawl into a little ball and flail off a thousand kilojoules of excess energy at the same time, and the combination is not doing good things for him. "You think being dead was freaky, it had _nothin'_ on this."

"It was like our parents knew there was some reason they should be worried about us, but they couldn't remember what it was," Rhyme puts in. "They're never that happy to see us when we get home on a normal day. They wanted to be angry at Beat for being careless – at both of us – but they were too relieved to see us. It must've been horrible for them."

"Forget _them_ – Dad looked like he was about to _hug_ me! I woulda died again right there!" says Beat. "Whole time we was in the game the only thing in my head is gettin' through it. Then suddenly Rhyme and me are standing on our doorstep and it hits me that our folks are gonna think we've been dead for three weeks. What the hell are we gonna _say?_ And then the door opens and everything's going nuts and Rhyme has to elbow me out of blurting out the whole story _three times_ before I catch that as far as they know we ain't been gone for the weekend. Never felt so boneheaded my whole life."

Neku leans back against the bench as Shiki makes appropriately sympathetic noises. He heard most of this on the phone a week ago, not so coherent without Rhyme's inputs, but there's something weirdly comforting about having Beat – born one of those rare individuals with no brain/mouth filter – having the big, loud freak out that everyone else is feeling but doesn't want to have in public.

"It was the same with my parents," says Neku – and it was, except that his mother really had hugged him for what had to be the first time since he was old enough to be trusted on his own feet – so completely out of the blue he hadn't known what to do with it. It wasn't like he'd expected to do his usual thing of walking in at any hour without either of them so much as glancing up from their latest row, but he'd walked home in such a daze – not seriously believing he'd even get home without hitting a Reaper wall somewhere – that by the time he had shown up and been proven alive and well and visible even to parents who usually didn't notice him coming home unless he walked right under their noses, he hadn't yet given a moment's thought to what he was going to say. Beat and Rhyme had it dead right: you could feel they knew there was some reason they ought to be glad he was home; the poor suckers just didn't have the faintest idea what.

He was finally packed off to his room, headphones unneeded for the first time since he couldn't remember when, because downstairs was blessedly quiet but for the kind of sounds you expect as a reminder that any family lived here. Neku knew he'd heard somewhere that surviving trauma was supposed to bring people closer together, but did that even apply when they didn't have the first clue what kind of trauma it was supposed to have been?

When, around midnight, the phone rang and he answered it to hear Beat's voice bitching about how many Sakuraba's there were in the phonebook and just what the hell _happened_ back there, man? It was the first thing that felt real all evening. By the time they hung up again it was so late it was early – so late that Neku's next impulse to see how 'Masaki' ranked against Shibuya's most common names had to be squashed down as a bad idea. He'd flopped down on his bed, not even out of the same clothes he'd been wearing since he couldn't remember when, convinced he wasn't going to sleep a wink, and that was the last thing he remembered before he was waking up to find the sunrise glaring through his window, having crashed so hard and fast it felt like nightfall back in the Reaper's Game all over again.

Neku cut school the next day in favour of camping out under Hachiko from practically the first light, jumping just about every time he saw anyone carrying anything black, whether it was plush toy-shaped or otherwise.

It was late by the time Shiki finally showed (whadya know, skipping school is a lot harder when there are people around who'll actually notice you're not there) but he didn't regret a minute of the wait. He'd never hugged someone for that long either. (Actually, that was probably almost as awkward for her as it'd been with his Mum, but at least he'd be able to explain himself at the end of it.)

Beat and Rhyme hadn't been able to come out and meet them properly until the end of the week because their parents had picked up this sudden unbelievable paranoia about letting them go out on their own, especially if there were any roads they might have to cross on the way, and it took them a few days to calm down.

Now, finally, here they all were, alive and well and apparently just expected to go on with their lives, everything resumed as normal, the management apologises for the delay.

And it certainly isn't news that the powers running the Game can rearrange a memory or two, Neku's got ample first hand experience of that one. Allegedly all of Shibuya is under their control, whatever that's actually supposed to mean. When all's said and done it's not hugely crazier than the idea of a bunch of invisible dead kids running around Shibuya and _shopping_ for their lives, but the kind of power it must take to rewrite three whole weeks and wipe everything clean from so many memories is nothing that can be brushed off so easily – and it wasn't just memories, there must've been funerals, gravestones – the whole shebang. Just trying to get his head around it gives Neku a headache.

Every time he makes the mistake of thinking the Game had run out of surprises it proves him wrong.

"My parents too," Shiki puts in, bringing Neku back to the conversation. For someone who'd had to explain to two of the three persons present why she didn't look anything like how they remembered her from when they'd first met, she was holding together her composure as successfully as anyone could have expected from her. Rhyme and Beat took it pretty well – and considering that Rhyme had spent four days treating her brother like a stranger, the level of cruel and unusual punishment in Game entry fees was nothing new to them. Explaining that Shiki's UG appearance was based on a friend of hers who was a very real person they might run into on the street any time was less comfortable when there were still so many raw personal issues tangled up with it, but there at least Rhyme seemed to have picked up enough of a hint to be sympathetic without prying, whereas Beat passed the whole thing off with "Man, that Game – ain't one part of it that's ever gonna make sense to anyone who's not as crazy as those Reapers themselves."

"Although…" Shiki adds with more trepidation, "um, you remember Eri? That friend I told you about?"

"Oh yeah, you've…" 'made up' is the word Neku wants but really not the one he wants to use in company, "talked things out with her, right?" Shiki saw how devastated Eri had been by her death. Coming back to life only to see Eri forget everything might well have been weirder than what happened with her parents.

"Sort of, it's a bit…" Shiki's hands are gripping her skirt hard enough to leave extra creases. "Well, actually, she showed up at our doorstep at five AM the morning after I got back, _completely_ freaking out. She said she'd had this horrible dream I'd died and it was so real she had to come right over to make sure it wasn't true and…" A shiver runs through Shiki, almost too fast to see. "She tried to play it down after she saw I was okay, but… you guys should've seen the look on her face when I answered the door."

The silence that follows that admission is simultaneously broken by Neku saying "Wow," just as Beat exclaims "Man!" shortly followed by Rhyme chiming in with the more important question, "Did she really dream everything that happened?"

"Right down to the details," Shiki breathes. "Everything that happened in the accident was there. You know how normally when people describe dreams they're full of, oh, dreamstuff? Things that don't make any sense? There was _nothing_ like that in this one. More like someone had taken a whole memory away from her and made her think it was a dream."

"That makes sense," says Neku, a little bitter and really not in the mood to hide it, "being as how that was exactly what happened."

"Do you think maybe that's what happened to the rest of our families too? They were made to think they'd dreamt all those memories?" wonders Rhyme. "It would explain why they all acted that way when we got back."

"I for one am _not_ gonna be asking," moans Beat.

"So what did you say to Eri?" Neku asks before they can get any more sidetracked.

"I sort of… told her everything," Shiki admits.

"Did she believe you?"

"I think so. She kept saying it was crazy, but when everything in the dream matched what I was telling her so well – and there were even a few things, like how the accident happened and the stuff she told Mina afterwards, that she hadn't even dared tell me about until I brought them up first. I mean, it felt so real to her she had to come over and make sure it wasn't true, so when she heard it was…" She looks up shyly, one of those expressions Neku remembers so well from her UG-self that he'd know her even without that plush-pig thing she's all but hugging to death. "Um, you guys don't mind, do you?"

Neku scratches his head. "I don't think so. You would've had to lie to your best friend's face about the biggest thing that ever happened to you… that's not something any of us would ask you to do."

"Like Phones said," says Beat.

"How much did you tell her?" asks Rhyme.

"Pretty much everything. All the parts I could explain. About the Reapers' Game and all of you. And we had a long talk about some stuff between us from before. We both cried a lot. She wants to meet all of you sometime, if that's okay. I think it'll make it easier for her to believe everything."

"Um, sure," says Neku. "I don't see why not." He's got no idea what he's actually supposed to _say_ to Eri when he meets her for real, but it's pretty obvious how much it's going to mean to Shiki that he at least makes the effort.

"So, for everyone else – our families and our other friends – we're just going to keep it a secret?" asks Rhyme.

"I guess," says Neku.

"Who'd believe us?" says Beat. "They'd lock us up for being nuts."

Shiki does the nervous look again, at each of them in turn (Neku last and longest), and finally voices the question they've all been dancing around all day. "So... what do we do now?"

There isn't actually any good reason Neku should have to think about how to answer that one. But there is a bad reason, being that that even though at the time the Reaper's Game might have been all about winning, or not losing, or things similarly mercenary and simple, Neku came back to the real world changed – in more ways than he's probably even ready to admit to himself yet – and he's glad of it. But the thing he can't – probably ever – say to the others is, "I'm glad it happened. And I'm glad all of you were the ones to go through it with me", because that's too close to, "I'm glad you all died and got put through three weeks of hell to earn a second chance," and making it sound the way he really means it would require him to venture into territory more sappy and touchy-feely than even the new post-Game Neku is ever likely to be capable of without a personality transplant and maybe a sex change too.

So instead he shrugs like it's not that big a deal and says, "We've got a second chance. We make the most of it."

And that's really all that needs to be said.

* * *

_The way he saw it, dying was just a career change. Been there, done that, worn the shroud… And then you got over it and got on with your life. Of course, he knew that many people didn't, for some reason, but he thought of them as not prepared to make the effort._

– Constable Reg Shoe on the subject of death, (Terry Pratchett, _The Fifth Elephant_)


	2. Yearning and Searching

**2. Yearning and Searching**

As of 1PM on the third Saturday since he woke up back in the real world, Neku has known Eri for slightly over an hour, and so far his defining impression of her is that she makes him uncomfortable. It probably wouldn't be hitting him so hard if he wasn't, for the moment and extending until the others get back with lunch, stuck on a bench with her by Hachiko with no-one but a few complete strangers and a pigeon for company. But here he is, and it's only making it worse that he knows his initial assessment of her hasn't been fair. She's a nice sort, even at her most self-conscious (see: today), and she's one of Shiki's closest friends, and Shiki is _his_ friend, so that's a lot of incentive for the two of them to be doing the mutual-friend-thing and trying their best to get on. So he assumes, at least. Neku's still so new to the idea of having friends that he's making up a lot of the rules as he goes along. During the one week he spent in the UG with Shiki she went through a lot of angst over a small misunderstanding with Eri, so he supposes he's also got the option of doing the friend-who's-overprotective-and-indignant-on-your-behalf thing instead, but it would take a much bigger arse than him to seriously try to turn all that into Eri's fault. None of which is any more than a side-note to the real problem.

The real problem is that about 67% of his brain still thinks her face is Shiki's, but Eri has her own voice and a subtle set of her own mannerisms, and every now and then she does some small thing that's so distinctly _not_ Shiki that it throws him in a way that's going to take a lot more than one measly hour of acquaintance to get used to. The problem is that even if he wants to respect whatever made her ask to have a word with him privately, meeting her under the circumstances was weird enough even when Shiki was still around as a buffer zone, and he'd be blind not to see that she's feeling that too. The _problem_ is that 'so I'm this guy who made friends with your best friend while she was dead for three weeks that got almost-completely wiped from your memory' doesn't carry a conversation very far. On which subject, Shiki might have said she told Eri 'everything' about the experience, but Neku is willing to bet that excluded a lot of details that are too personal to share with anyone – or worse, things Shiki's going to want to come clean about eventually, but which Eri is going to take hearing a whole lot better from Shiki herself than to having blurted out to her by a near-stranger without barely enough tact to get by. Shiki has failed to supply him with any kind of list of exactly which details fall into which category, and that leaves Neku tiptoeing through the eggshells of safe conversational subjects. The time he tried to strangle Shiki, for example, is hopefully in the first category for good. What Shiki spent the Game looking like could be either of the two.

He's already started to wish Shiki had lied from the outset and told Eri he was just some old friend who'd moved back to the area, or some guy she met on holiday somewhere, and saved them all this messy stuff dancing around the truth. He can't imagine why Eri ever wanted to talk to him to begin with.

"…and even if we wanted to tell anyone else it's not like we have a shred of proof," he's saying, largely to have anything to say. "But it's not like any of us would want to make a big deal out of it. Getting back and finding out none of our families had noticed we were gone, that was as weird as anything the Game threw at us – and trust me when I tell you it threw some unbelievably weird shit around. But now it's over, I'm glad we can just put it behind us. The last thing we would have wanted was to get back to life and have to go around explaining the Reapers' Game to everyone. It's the kind of thing most people would be happier not having to hear about." He makes it all the way to the end of that sentence before he realises that 'people' arguably counts Eri and he's basically just told her she shouldn't want to know all this stuff she's come here to find out and oh great, like this hadn't been awkward enough already. There just isn't any way to back-pedal through all that again without sounding too lame for words.

"You're not wrong," says Eri, apparently missing his last faux pas. She has her hands clasped in her lap, and since telling him she wanted to talk she's made eye contact mostly in small, furtive glances. "Shiki talked about it for hours that night and I still don't think I've got my head around half of it. It would be easier if I thought she was crazy, but – she's _Shiki_, you know?" She hesitates, and when she starts again it comes out in a rush, with the sound of something that's been mentally rehearsed too many times. "She tried to play the danger down, but I'm lucky any of you made it back, aren't I? And to talk to her I've got you to thank that she made it through at all."

Shiki _would_ make it sound like that. "She probably didn't tell you how I wouldn't have made it through the first day without her. I was halfway through that week before I had any clue what I was doing. It took someone beating me over the head pretty hard with everything I was doing wrong to get me that far." She'd obviously left out the bit where it was all Neku's fault she hadn't made it home by the first weekend too, but that was first-category stuff if anything was and his own private guilt trip.

The admission gets him a small smile. "She did say something about you being a bit of a jerk to her for the first couple of days."

There's no point even pretending to take offence at that one. "She wasn't exaggerating that part." It would have been nice to blame it on the amnesia, except that suggesting he'd have been any better company otherwise was basically one big fat lie.

"So..." There's not even a sideways glance this time, she's just not looking at him at all. "What changed?"

Neku tries very hard not to read too much into body language that hasn't even been in the language he's been expecting from Eri's body from the moment they met.

"Well, that's pretty much what the whole Game's about." Other than royally screwing everyone over, that is. "If you can't learn to trust your partner, you might as well give up on the first day."

There's an awkward silence; quite an achievement in the middle of such an awkward conversation.

"Look," says Eri at last, "I know I'll probably never be able to begin to understand what you guys went through that week, but I want you to know – if there's anything between you and Shiki…"

Out of all the awkward questions that might have turned up in this train-wreck of a conversation, this is one Neku has been at least halfway expecting, but it's still well up there with the ones he's been least looking forward to answering. Incredibly, this ripper of an experience still only ranks as the third most awkward thing he's had to deal with since making it back to the land of the living. The trophy for second place goes to the conversation he had with his Mum the night he got back, but first place is reserved for a conversation he had with Shiki a little after they'd started getting over the overwhelming euphoria of just knowing they'd both made it back for real. That had been when Shiki, with a lot of 'um's and 'ah's and constant verbal backtracking, came out and told him she had to get it out in the open – that she _knew_ what it meant that she'd been the price for his second week (and she didn't hold it against him at all!) and she liked him a lot and she was really quite flattered, but, well, she'd only known him for a few weeks and only a few days of that actually counted (and quite frankly he'd changed so much in that time that she could hardly believe he was the same person), and she just wasn't sure how she felt about him just yet, or how _much_ she felt about him, or, um, whatever. You know?

That had left Neku with no option but to explain in similar mode that the thing about the price he'd paid for his second week was… well, he'd spent his first week with his memory in so many pieces he was lucky he'd remembered his own name. He hadn't even _known_ what he had apart from his self-identity that he cared about enough to be his price – whereas she'd been right there. Put up with enough bitching from him to qualify for sainthood and generally been the whole reason he'd had any chance of making it back to normal human behaviour, let alone back to life – not to mention being basically the first real friend he'd ever had. So the fact she'd become what he valued most by the end of that week had been a foregone conclusion, and not something to read anything more into. It was such an obvious relief to Shiki that they _hadn't_ morphed into more-than-friends in the two weeks she'd been out of action that he couldn't regret the conversation too much, though the reality was that he wasn't sure even now how much he'd meant it – didn't know whether if they'd both gotten to go home at the end of the first week the way they'd expected they wouldn't eventually have had a conversation that started like this but reached a very different conclusion about where they stood with each other. Now that the issue had been forced though, it feels pretty final, and for all he knows, it's for the best. He doesn't need his first real friendship getting any more complicated.

"There's nothing really," he tells Eri, who doesn't immediately seem to believe him, and he can't really blame her either. "Stuff got pretty intense, I'm not going to sugar-coat any of that, and I owe Shiki a lot, but with her and me… it's not like that, you know?"

"And if I asked Shiki would she tell me the same thing?"

If there's one upside to having talked it all out with Shiki, it's being able to answer that one without exaggerating anything. "I partnered _Beat_ in my third week, and just about everything I just told you about Shiki goes for that week too. No offence to him, but he's not really my type either."

It gets him the smile he'd been going for.

"I'm sorry, really, I'm being such a busybody today. I didn't mean to imply… I _know_ it's none of my business..."

"It's cool," says Neku, and surprisingly, it is. For all of the fifteen seconds before Eri's smile fades back into her face.

"Look," she says, "I… I'm just going to have to ask you to listen while I babble here for a bit, okay, because I need to get the rest of this out in one go. When I met Shiki… well, you have to understand, I've wanted to be a fashion designer for as long as I can remember – designing clothes is my dream, but hand me a needle and it's like I've got two left thumbs. Then I meet her – this _amazing_ girl who can take one look at my silly little scribbles, vanish into her sewing room for a day and she's turned out this _incredible_ outfit that looks _so much better_ than I ever imagined my scrappy little designs could. It was like we were born to work together.

"But all along… I _knew_ she was jealous of me, for being the trendy, popular one. The first day we spoke it was like she couldn't believe someone like me wanted to talk to her at all. She's my best friend in the whole world and she knows me better than anyone, but she's never had many other people she was close to. She's got… got this _image_ of herself as someone who's shy and bookish and not pretty enough to be popular and if I was the friend I should really be I'm sure I should have done more to help her get past that, but… but the truth is there's this horrible part of me that _liked_ it. I didn't want to have to share her. She has so much talent and there was this stupid fear in my head that if she ever made other friends, she'd be the one realising _I_ wasn't anything special and I'd lose her and…" Eri takes a desperate gulp for air and charges on, even faster, if that was possible. "Well, it came to the point where this one day she was feeling down about how she couldn't come up with her own designs and I think I kind of freaked. We work so well together, but if she could do designs herself, what would she need me for? That was when I blurted out that stupid, _stupid_ thing about how she just wasn't cut out to be a designer, and it came out so wrong that I didn't even realise until it was too late that she'd taken it in a way I never meant and I'd really hurt her.

"Then the very next day I'm waking up from this horrible nightmare that what I said broke her heart and she ran off and got herself killed – and it all turned out to be true! – and suddenly I'm hearing she's been through this incredible, world-changing, life-or-_death_ experience with these people who she never knew existed a month ago, and especially this one guy who she says she'd never have made it back without – and then I talk to him and he's saying all the exact same things about her! – and it's like, how can I ever compare to all that? It's only by some weird fluke that I ever knew about any of this – I'm not even supposed to remember! She went through this incredible experience that I can't begin to get my head around, and I wasn't there for her, didn't even get to see her off or pray for her or any of the things you're supposed to do because I didn't have the faintest idea it was happening until too late. And now there's this part of me – oh god, I can't believe I'm saying this – that's so incredibly jealous of you all. You and she and the others could have died, and there's part of me that's feeling mad and left out because I didn't get to go too." She stops, just long enough to hiccough in a really pained sounding way – but she's not in tears or even really close to it, and somehow that just makes it scarier. "And you think _your_ story's crazy."

Neku is left trying very hard not to gape. He'd thought he understood that Shiki and Eri's relationship was a whole lot more complicated than Shiki had admitted when she'd first mentioned Eri's name. Apparently, the truth is he'd had _no fucking idea_. And it's only then he notices just how much she's cringing away from him – even now she's done with all that – because, oh hell, she really thinks she deserves contempt for all this? But there's also a big feeling is relief, because at least now he knows what all that tension through the rest of this was coming from.

Well, so much for most of his resolve about the 'safe' areas for this conversation.

He takes a deep breath, sure he's going to need it. "This may sound pretty lame," he admits, flying on instinct because even he's not sure he knows where he's going with this yet – but the instinct is that this is all fixable, he just needs the words to make Eri see that. "But… you were there for her. Way more than you think."

"…Neku?"

"Hear me out here, okay? Shiki had this photo of you on her phone. I spent the first three days wondering why she kept looking at it so much until she explained about it and who you were."

Eri is giving him a guarded look, very deliberately withholding judgement until she knows where he's going with this.

"That thing from the day when we saw you talking to, whatshername, Mina – Shiki told you about this already, right? – that was the _moment_ she decided she had to make it back no matter what. You _need_ something like that to keep you focused long enough to make it through. I don't mean it like it was a good thing you guys had that argument just so she could get that boost when she needed it, but, well, fact is – if you hadn't meant something to her, it never could have hurt her so much."

From the way Eri's eyes are widening, Shiki _did_ tell her, it just took Neku spelling it out for her to make that last connection. Now he's just casting around for some way to wrap all this up, and what he lands on is, "Just… trust her a bit more in future, alright? She adores you. She's not out to replace you, she doesn't have that in her."

"You really mean all that, don't you?" says Eri, looking just a little awed.

Neku shrugs. "Sure. The Game really forces you to think about what really matters to you. But with Shiki, I think she pretty much knew from the beginning."

"If I hug you," says Eri nervously, "you won't take it the wrong way, right?"

Wonderful way to end an already sky-high awkward conversation, but, "Nah, you're safe."

Eri's hug is short, to the point, and practically resonating with all the fear and gratitude she has no better way to express.

"Thank you, _so_ much, for making sure she got back to me," she chokes out. "I… think I can deal with her having a friend or two like you."

"Any time."

Just to prove that there's someone up there with a half-arsed sense of timing, it's right about then that Shiki, Rhyme and Beat show up again, loaded down with burgers and salads.

If Eri has any doubts left, the way Shiki relaxes the moment she realises he and Eri are getting on just fine should be telling her everything she needs to know.


	3. Disorganisation

**3. Disorganisation**

So it should probably have been a given that readjusting to being alive again would take a bit of doing, with or without all that crazy selective memory stuff everyone who ever knew Neku had so conveniently done when he got back. It takes a bit longer for Neku to get around to admitting that winning the game, even winning it three weeks running, isn't the same as being able to stop playing it somewhere in the back of his mind. It sure as hell isn't anything like being able to forget about it. It's there in all sorts of things – the recurring dream about waking up in the Scramble Crossing, the nagging need to look over his shoulder for Taboo Noise, the part of him that's always secretly disappointed that a pin is just a pin now and not a tool that will let him summon fire or fling a motorbike across the street. It's a novelty just to be able to walk around Shibuya without having to worry every couple of blocks that he's about to run head first into a Reaper wall; the places he passes aren't just Udagawa or Centre Street or Hachiko anymore, they're the place Shiki barely bailed him out of a surprise Noise attack or the place there'd been flowers for Beat and Rhyme's memorial or the place he first saw Minamimoto's junk piles. It's hard to go anywhere without wondering if right at that moment the Game is on again and there might be invisible players right in front of him, struggling to master Psyches or make head or tail of what Shibuya's fashion trends have to do with their survival. Neku came out of the game changed and mostly glad of it, but Shibuya has changed too – a whole other world opened under his feet only to be closed again just as suddenly, and if he's ever going to be able to put it out of his mind again he's not there yet.

It was a full week before he worked up the guts to set foot in any of the shops with the innocuous Reaper decal stamped by their door, and even then he spent the whole time it took to eat his taco watching customers come and go, just in case he caught sight of one disappearing the moment they stepped out of the door. It takes two more weeks on top of that before he 'gets around' to venturing into Cat Street for the first time, home of the infamous Mr H, a.k.a. Sanae Hanekoma, mild mannered café owner; a.k.a. Cat, secretive artist and designer; a.k.a…. well, they never did quite clear that part up, did they? The Wildcat has no more customers than he ever remembers it having, the owner cracking a broad grin as he walks in ("Phones! Long time no see!" "…yeah, sorry, I did this crazy thing where I went and got a life." He hadn't intended that to make Mr H. laugh so hard). To kill time, Neku forks over the price of a cup of coffee and fields a few innocuous questions about the health of himself and a couple of friends: he's doing fine, Shiki's doing just great, and by the way, Beat is fine too, before you ask…

"Oh, Beat?" says Hanekoma. "He was in here a good two weeks ago. Stopped past to say the menu was over his budget and he still doesn't get quite how you all made it back at all, but he wanted to thank me for everything I did for Rhyme in that first week and apologise for taking off like that. He's a good kid."

Trust Beat, thinks Neku. Just when he thought he had the guy figured out to the third decimal place, he goes and makes himself the one first in line to break the Cat Street embargo – which Neku had not, okay, actually bothered to tell him about in so many words, so if the others hadn't taken it as the given he'd assumed it was, he had no-one else to blame. Beat hadn't had nearly as good a seat as Neku to… well, whatever the hell it was that had gone down when they'd confronted the 'Composer' at last, so he hasn't even got any real reason to suspect Mr H. of anything sleazy, and suspicions aside, they all owe Mr H. their lives at least once over. But that doesn't negate what Neku really came here to talk about either.

Five minutes here and already it's not going to plan – not that he'd ever bothered to plan this out. There'd been some kind of expectation in his head that it would all have to be either easier or harder – either Mr H would spill the whole story the moment he walked in or he'd get to Cat Street to find the Wildcat was gone and the street address was now filled by a pet shop filled of tropical fish, and run by a foreigner who spoke only enough Japanese to insist she'd been working there for years. What he's been forgetting somehow is that he's dealing with a guy who'll happily tell you his shoe size and star sign before getting within light years of mentioning that the reason he was qualified to hand out helpful little pearls of advice about the Reaper's Game had something to do with how he was one of the same shadowy figures up there in charge of administrating it. Truth be told, Neku isn't sure he wants to know what Mr H's deal is. He has enough to get his head around already, including the part he came here to ask about, and if he doesn't ask now he's going to lose his nerve and then he'll probably never get to at all.

"So all that stuff about Joshua, that was what, some kind of cover story?" He tries to make it sound more nonchalant than bitter. He probably isn't succeeding so well.

Mr H's eyebrows winch themselves up a notch. "Cover story? Phones, if you're going to change gears that fast, you're going to have to give the rest of us a bit more chance to catch up."

"Don't play dumb, Mr H," and this is one he's had stuck in his gut so long now it feels like he's pulling it out with a claw hammer, "I'm talking about how you let me think the only reason he knew so much about the Game was because he was some psychic kid who hung out at your shop!"

"Sure he was," says Hanekoma, so easily it makes Neku's teeth hurt. "You don't learn all the ins and outs of the Reaper's Game from the back of a cereal packet. You think I'd lie to you about something like that, Phones?"

"Mr H, he was the Composer all along!" Saying it out loud doesn't make thunder rumble, doesn't make Shibuya crumble to the ground, and that seems wrong.

"Oh, since you met him, sure. But he wasn't _born_ Composer. I told you we went way back."

Neku has to take a minute to process that into his post-Game world-view, to decide that Hanekoma isn't just stringing him along here this time, then another minute to feel dumb he hadn't guessed it for himself. But damn it, the sane response to finding out you've been lied to isn't to underestimate where the lies started. There's still the matter of Mr H. letting him assume Joshua was just a regular player, but there was no way to bring that up that didn't sound like whining even in his own head.

"How long back?" he asks stupidly.

"Waaaaay back," Hanekoma grins, as much answer as Neku was going to get.

"He spent the week making me think his whole goal was to _become_ Composer."

"Just his way of nudging you in the right direction. There'd be the nostalgia factor for him too – even our Composer's not immune to that." He fixes Neku with a look over the top of his spectacles. "Listen up, Phones – I'll share something with you you wouldn't hear from anyone else. I've seen my share of Composers come and go. Josh may not have been born Composer, but he was born to be one. I'm not just talking about his 'special' powers among the living. Succession's a cutthroat business anywhere about Harrier in the Reaper Brass, but Josh got his sights set on it, coasted through his week and was through the door before anyone knew what was happening. I won't tell you he never broke a sweat doing it, but he went head to head with one of the toughest Games played anywhere in the world and made it look easy. And between you and me, he's been bored out of his skull ever since."

"He seems like the kind of guy who makes his own fun."

"Sure, but having a city under your thumb isn't all you might think it is. There's rules even a Composer doesn't get to break. Running a city might keep a body occupied, but the thrill was in the chase for him, and he hasn't had that since. 'May you get everything you ever asked for' is a curse in some parts of the world."

Put like that it's a little too easy to picture. No wonder razing the place to the ground entered the agenda. "Leaving Shibuya in the hands of a spoiled brat."

"Absolute power corrupts a lot of folks much worse," Hanekoma shrugs. "It's pretty lonely at the top. Like I said the first time, he's not a bad kid, he's just not so good at reaching out to people. Can you blame him, with where he's coming from? You of all people should know how hard it is to make friends when you won't admit you need 'em. Takes a big person to make the first move for someone like that."

Neku's had so much food for thought out of this conversation already that he's going to be chewing over it in his head for weeks, so it takes him a moment to get to noticing just exactly what Mr H. actually said. "Oh no. No no no. Please tell me you're not saying what I think you are."

"Did I say anything?" Hanekoma remains the very picture of unconvincing innocence.

"I _tried_ being his friend! It fell apart around about when he got around to admitting he'd he killed me, wiped my mind and spent the whole time I knew him screwing me over!"

"How's all that working out for you?" says Hanekoma, like the worst Joshua's done is enter Neku in a cake raffle without his knowledge.

Neku slams both hands down on the counter, hears his stool screech across the floor behind him and wobble precariously back and forth several times. "You talked me into trusting him once already! It ended with him waving everything in my face and shooting me again!" The part where he woke up alive again afterwards is a bit of a sticking point in that complaint, but it hardly invalidates it. "Mr H, he's done nothing but play me from the day we met! You can't make me believe he meant for it to work out this way. He wanted to burn Shibuya to the ground!"

"Bit much for you to complain he took you out first then."

"He treats life and death like it's some sort of game!"

"And yet here you are – and all your new friends – alive and better than ever! Sure he doesn't deserve maybe a little credit for engineering that?"

Neku sits back down again with a thud, finds a crack in the countertop and develops the crazy idea that it's laughing at him. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I am." He looks up reluctantly, only to discover to his horror that, for what is barely the second time today, Hanekoma actually looks serious.

"Neku, as I recall it, that last game wasn't quite so one sided. I recall there being a gun in your hands too. Even some kind of instruction to fire on the count of ten? A chance to take all you anger out at him in one shot?"

"So? He _knew_ I wouldn't."

"Did he?"

"He was sure feeling pretty safe about it."

"So what do you think would have happened if you'd fired it?"

_I'd be Composer?_ The thought had hardly even struck him at the time. "Not a lot. I saw what happened when Pi-face tried to shoot him."

"Was that really why you didn't shoot?"

Why? What did he mean, was that why? It was so obvious in Neku's head there was no way to put it into words. There _had_ been one rage-filled moment when he could almost believe he was going to do it – he'd been laughed at, put through hell, threatened with losing everything he'd never known he had, and he'd wanted nothing more than to splatter Joshua's brains all over the wall. It hadn't lasted through the count to ten. You just _couldn't_ go from thinking you owe someone your life to being prepared to kill them with not even five minutes to think about it. What kind of person could do something like that?

Because even if he was 99% sure he couldn't have touched Joshua with a bazooka – even if he was convinced he was really going to die and a bullet would be the best parting gift he had to give – he'd still have had to die knowing he'd pulled the trigger.

"So what, I'm pathetic because I wasn't prepared to kill someone I hate?" Neku mutters. The crack in the counter top still looks like it's laughing at him.

"Nah," says Hanekoma, master of all the universe's open secrets. "But you just might be alive because of it."

Neku has finally, officially, had enough of this for today. Enough of this for a lifetime. _Two_ lifetimes. He knows he's going to be turning this over in his head all day, if not all week and beyond – knows with a kind of sad inevitability that the longer he goes at it, the more he's going to be finding stuff in what Mr H just told him that he can't ignore, no matter how much he doesn't like it. But he figures he's got at least a few good hours of perfectly good denial left before he gets to the worst of it, so he might as well make a head start.

"Well, if he ever wants to apologise for screwing me over, he knows where to find me."

He's most of the way to the door when he hears Hanekoma say, "I'll pass that on, shall I?"

"Yeah," says Neku, hardly hearing himself over what sounds like all of Shibuya buzzing in his ears, "you do that."


End file.
